Boots to cut 900 jobs, mainly at former Nottingham headquarters

Alliance Boots plans to cut up to 900 jobs at its former headquarters in
Nottingham where Boots was founded in 1849.

No jobs will go at Boots' stores around the UK, the company said. Instead the redundancies will come from a "streamlined" manufacturing and supply chain.

By Amy Wilson

6:30AM BST 05 Oct 2010

The company had pledged that Nottingham would remain at the heart of the business when it was taken over by private equity firm KKR in 2007, but now plans to make the job cuts to save £56m a year by 2013/14.

No jobs will go at Boots' stores around the UK, the company said. Instead the redundancies will come from a "streamlined" manufacturing and supply chain, a smaller number of managers and new support systems employing fewer people, Alliance Boots said.

The cuts are being made in Boots' health and beauty division, and a manufacturing site which makes health and beauty products for other companies, rather than in its wholesale pharmaceuticals business.

The job losses will cost Boots £67m, but the company said it hopes some of the 900 redundancies can be achieved by normal turnover of staff and moving people to other parts of the business.

The GMB union said it would seek urgent talks with Boots about the planned redundancies. However the company said most of the job cuts affected white-collar workers who are not union members. About 150 of the 900 jobs are in manufacturing, Boots said.

Alex Gourlay, chief executive of Alliance Boots' health and beauty business, said the changes were being made to remove extra layers of management built up when Alliance Unichem and Boots merged in 2006.

"This is the completion of a task we knew would be a part of putting Alliance and Boots together," said Mr Gourlay. "Our intention is to be open and transparent about how we see the future, but we understand the impact that today's announcement may have on our people."

There are no plans to cut jobs in shops, Mr Gourlay said, and Boots is taking on an extra 7,000 temporary staff for Christmas.

Boots was started by John Boot in Nottingham's Goose Gate in 1849, and expanded by his son Jesse who took over in 1877. The company had more than 550 shops by 1914.

In 2006, Boots merged with Alliance Unichem, set up by Stefano Pessina, who joined KKR to take the company private for £11bn the following year.

Alliance Boots employs about 70,000 people in the UK. The job cuts account for less than 10pc of the non-shop workforce of the health and beauty and manufacturing divisions, the company said. Alliance Boots reported pretax profits of £475m in the year to the end of March, up from £13m the previous year.